In Gaelic cosmology the bird moves between the realm of the human and spirit as go-between and oracle; people heeded their warnings as seers of the land and place. In recent re-imaginings this otherworld has been supplanted with the conviction that birds and animals reveal a different form of relationality with the environment that answers the crisis of the Anthropocene. Contemporary artists are looking to access the truths of these old myths and their current retelling as post-anthropocentric ways of being through imitation and mimicry. Cloaking ourselves in the skin of another has always been a mechanism of transformation, and Scottish folklore is resplendent with shapeshifting creatures: from selkies to boobries, the skin’s surface reveals truths and access to other worlds through adopting its coverings. This transformation is based on an operation of sympathetic magic. A material connection between artist and bird needs the material trace of each to be activated. More than metaphor then, feathers and fur act as a material theatre of readdress.
This paper explores this operation within Gaelic culture through the realism of the actual: how the specificity of the feather and the skein of fur imbue art with an affective vitality that is central to addressing the Anthropocene. Aligning with Josephine Berry’s planetary realism (2025) and a state of being in relation to, this paper is premised on delineating how this relation speaks through material surfaces. Drawing from the writing of anthropologist James Frazer (1922) in particular and the concept of sympathetic magic, it seeks to foreground the centrality of touch for a material realism.
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